Volume 35, Issue 1

Beginnings For several years, a group of leaders representing statewide and large regional collaborative digitization programs has been meeting at the American Library Association (ALA) Annual and Mid-winter conferences. These 1.5-hour meetings include brief presentations on topics of mutual interest, such as technical issues, emerging standards, and funding. These meetings also serve as a forum for sharing program updates, including concerns and achievements. The usefulness of these meetings, and the desire to extend participation to program representatives who do not normally attend the ALA conferences, especially staff from museums and historical societies, led to discussion of holding a national conference to focus on issues that large-scale collaborative digitization projects have in common.

Introduction In the year 2000, the directors of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology decided to add moving images to their Library of Natural Sounds. By that time, the sound library had been building for more than 70 years and had become the world's largest archive of animal sounds. The decision to add video and film to the world-renowned audio archive expanded the mission of the Library toward the archival of animal behavior recordings writ large. The new multimedia archive was renamed the Macaulay Library, after our principal patrons Linda and William Macaulay, and was re-branded as a medium-agnostic resource for zoological natural history recordings.

Thanks to support from the North Carolina Farm Bureau, the North Carolina Tobacco Foundation, and the North Carolina Research Commission, the NCSU Libraries' Special Collections Research Center will construct, enhance, and maintain the “Living Off the Land” Web site. The site will provide digital access to collections of rare and unique items on tobacco and crop science history in North Carolina dating from 1850 through 1950. Tobacco has figured prominently not only in the economy of the state, but also in its culture, from colonial times to the present. Agricultural history is a frequent area of interest for researchers and visitors alike to North Carolina's cultural repositories. Completion of this project will result in expanded access to the resources available for the study of the state's tobacco and crop science history.